Twenty-five years ago, the Tucson Symphony Orchestra performed Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.
That was the last time it has been played professionally in Tucson, which is why Ben Nisbet figured it was about time for Tucson to experience it again.
Only one problem: Nisbet , artistic director of the venerable St. Andrew’s Bach Society summer chamber music series, couldn’t find any trumpet players up to the task of playing the exceedingly challenging role.
“The solo trumpet part is the reason that it doesn’t get performed very often because it is so difficultly impossible to play that most trumpet players won’t play it,” explained Nisbet, a longtime TSO violinist who has led the society since 2012.
But Nisbet had a feeling that if he asked his TSO colleague Conrad Jones, the principal trumpet player, he would have his trumpeter.
“Conrad’s a young guy. He’s fearless,” Nisbet said, and apparently he was right; Jones agreed without hesitation.
“I felt like it was the kind of thing where I knew it was going to be hard for me, but I love the piece anyway,” said Jones, who will join Nisbet and a chamber orchestra comprised of their TSO colleagues including Concertmaster Lauren Roth to perform the No. 2 during the society’s Brandenburg Festival on Sunday, Aug. 30.
In addition to the second concerto, the group will perform Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos No. 1, 4 and 5 in what is arguably one of the society’s most compelling and challenging concerts in its 27 summer seasons.
“I think sometimes it’s easy for us to forget that because we do big things every year,” said Nisbet, who has closed each of his past two summer seasons with blockbuster endings: a concert performance of Henry Purcell’s Baroque opera “Dido and Aeneas” in 2013 and Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons — A Ballet” last summer featuring Artifact Dance Project. Nisbet’s wife is co-founder of the dance company.
“As far as trading on (Bach’s) name, this is big,” he added.
The enormity of the concert is not lost on Roth, who performed with the society at last year’s Vivaldi and in a concert earlier this summer.
“The Brandenburg concertos are some of the greatest music of Bach,” she said, adding that she has never performed the No. 2 or 4 concertos. “I have been happy to throw myself into these pieces. The music is fabulous.”
Jones, who spent most of his summer performing at festivals and with his Kyōdai Brass Quintet, said he has been studying the score and “inhabiting the piece” since June “so that when the time comes to pick up this very dangerous instrument, I will have a strategy.”
The dangerous instrument is the piccolo trumpet he found on Ebay early this summer that will allow him to reach the higher register Bach set for the trumpet.
“Everything about hitting the notes is a little more sensitive,” he said. “Instead of walking across a bridge over the Grand Canyon you kind of walk a tight rope. That’s the best way I can explain it.”
But he said he has “done the work and I know the piece inside and out, backward and forward” and is ready for Sunday’s concert, which actually will mark the second time he has played the Brandenburg No. 2. The first was at a funeral years ago, which “was sort of a weird way to take a crack at it. I was a little young and a little more foolish.”
“This is something for me that I’ve wanted to play for a while,” he said. “I knew it was going to be hard for me, but I love the piece anyway.”
